The Fetish Of Centrism

He doesn't come out and say it, but I think Jonathan Chait's piece on the Democratic congress, really puts the lie to this idea that what we need right now is group of Senators assembled to prevent the Democratic Party from tilting to the left. My beef isn't with people who aren't as liberal as me--it's with people who call themselves moderates because it polls well, or to cover for their fundraising efforts. As Evan Bayh admitted, these dudes have no stated platform. They're just yelling "Centrism!" into a crowded room.

So what do they want? Who really knows. But here's Chait on Mr. Moderate Ben Nelson:

The most emblematic objection has come from Nelson,
who is balking at Obama's plan to save money on college loans. You
might suppose that a fiscal conservative like Nelson would agree with
Obama's plan to save $4 billion on a social program. But he does not,
for reasons that provide a useful window into the rot afflicting the
congressional Democratic Party.

For many years, the federal
government supported college education by guaranteeing bank loans to
students. If a student defaulted on his loan, Washington would simply
pay back the difference. In 1993, Clinton undertook to reform the
program by cutting out the middlemen and simply having the federal
government issue the loans directly. Clinton hoped to save money for
the government and plow some of those savings into lower interest rates
for students. Of course, private lenders who benefitted from the
no-risk profit stream balked and forced a compromise whereby both kinds
of loans--guaranteed private loans, and direct loans from the
government--would exist side by side.

Recent years have shown
beyond a doubt that the direct lending program works better. Every
independent analysis--by the Congressional Budget Office, by the Office
of Management and Budget under each of the last three presidents, and
by the New America Foundation--has found that direct lending is
cheaper. The guaranteed-loan program managed to cling to life through
its congressional patrons and through simple graft. In 2007, a major
student-loan scandal emerged when it turned out that private lenders
paid off college administrators to drop out of the direct lending
program and steer students to them.

Obama thus proposes to save
the taxpayers more than $4 billion per year by ending the guaranteed
loans. This is as straightforward a case as you can find of a fight
between special interests and the public good. Nelson opposes it
because one of the lenders that benefits from federal overpayments is
based in Lincoln, Nebraska.

There's so much more. Read the piece.

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